Windows 10: On buying new or used Laptop / PC beware of Conexant chips

Like most of you know most laptops used to ship with audio chips from either Realtek or Conexant up till a year back .

The funny thing is Conexant had went bankrupt on 2014 after achieving a revenue less than 190 million usd through out the year 2013 handing the lead to Realtek with revenue close to 2.5 billion usd .

Why this is funny ? because most pc and laptop manufacturers persisted to ship devices with Conexant chips up till mid 2017 . How was this possible is beyond me , but maybe they could nail a huge stock of chips at a pretty low price on company's fight for survival that it took those manufacturers years to disperse the amount fully .

Now there is a catch , sweet Microsoft whether decided to legacy out those chips or whether the chips really have a problem in architecture with its most recent build 1803 of Windows 10 , are putting a lot of manufacturers into stress trying to handle the situation with care so not to backfire at them to be forced to collect / replace recently sold units with such chips.

Manufacturers like HP , IBM , LENOVO , DELL had been facing a lot of support request regarding the situation with minimal understanding from buyers of why our audio isn't working or have problems on new windows update . The answers now vary from "We are sorry but your current device warranty has expired please refer to whatever blahs and follow those loops before contacting us" to "Please uninstall the current Conexant driver and use windows default HD audio and use the hide update tool from Microsoft to stop the driver from updating" to "Your device isn't eligible for this windows update" .

Now I really don't know how to think about this situation yet or how to handle it , or to who to point the finger at but for a start if you are buying , you may come across discounted units from last year or other units being sold used . Do bother yourself by googling which chip it uses for audio just to save yourself the hassle of nailing a brand new legacy hardware *Smile

Cheers

:)